Your sales team is about as likely to spend their time conscientiously making your event recruitment or other marketing program calls as they are to be updating database information.

That’s not to say it will never happen. After all, database information can be updated when the rep finds a phone number is out of date and has a new one readily available. Similarly, knowing that a conference or demo that could open a conversation is available to someone they’ve been wanting to reach is actually very useful information for a sales rep. But, if they do manage to get that person on the phone they’ll quickly drop your registration priorities and move the conversation in their own direction. It’s what they’re paid to do.

Even when your sales team is making invitation calls to support an event, you cannot assume that the calls will be made on your timetable, that ALL the calls will be made, that accounts that don’t look important to the rep won’t get skipped and you can’t guarantee the wording of the message.

If your plan for driving event registrations or reminders or promoting content offers, specifies that “sales will make the calls”, please step back a minute and consider what you’re asking.

Often your marketing lists will be big enough to require that if the sales team is going deliver the support you need, they’ll have to drop other work. Even the reps who want to help you are not going to blow out half their week making 150 calls to secure registrants. If they work on commission only, they cannot support you.

Often small businesses will use (abuse) their sales team by assuming that marketing support calls are part of the sales job, which they are not. They usually reach that conclusion on the mistaken assumption that having sales make calls doesn’t cost anything, while in truth you are not only paying out too high a salary for a very low-level job, you’re also paying the huge penalty of lost revenue when sales is pulled off their real job.

If you are required to expect that you are getting support from your sales callers for any kind of marketing program, the only way to protect yourself and your program is to realistically look at what support you’re really going to get from the sales team and adjust your expectations accordingly.